THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

They Took Their Stand in Dixie

They Took Their Stand in Dixie

By John Marquardt on Jan 10, 2018

Advance the flag of Dixie
For Dixie's land we take our stand
To live or die for Dixie
And conquer peace for Dixie

Anyone singing the above lyrics from the patriotic Confederate song of 1861, "Dixie to Arms," would today, as with its earlier counterpart "Dixie," be considered most politically incorrect and would probably ignite a firestorm of protest demonstrations and vitriolic tweets of condemnation. That 1861 song, however, was not, as one might now imagine, a polemic composed by some fire-eating Southern defender of slavery, but rather, like "Dixie," it was written by a born and bred Northerner . . . a man many now consider to be America's Plato, Albert Pike of Massachusetts. Like many in both the North and South at that time, Pike, while not an outright abolitionist, did believe slavery to be an evil that would ultimately be eliminated. Furthermore, even though he considered that secession did not violate the Constitution, he felt the North and South should settle their differences by mutual agreement, rather than by separation. However, as a strong advocate of state sovereignty and regional equality, Pike was also of the opinion that if such differences were irreconcilable, then secession was the only possible solution.

The Boston-born Pike was a celebrated author, jurist, poet and philosopher, as well as a futurist who, in 1871, predicted both World Wars and a potential third such conflict. He was educated at Harvard where he received an honorary master's degree and was the head of his own school when, in 1831, he joined an expedition to New Mexico. Pike finally settled in Arkansas where he became a newspaper editor and an attorney who acted as a public defender of the rights of Native-Americans, and even argued cases on their behalf before the federal Supreme Court . . . once winning a three-million dollar judgement for a Choctaw tribe. After Arkansas seceded, Pike was first appointed as the Confederate Commissioner of the Indian Territory and then made a brigadier general in command of Indian troops, leading the tribal regiments during the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas. Following the Confederate defeat, a clash with Major General Thomas C. Hindman over tactics led to Pike resigning his commission and returning to his law practice. In 1864, Pike was made a judge of the Arkansas Supreme Court and after his retirement, he mainly devoted his life to Freemasonry . . . ultimately becoming that order's sovereign grand commander. In 1898, seven years after Pike's death, the United States Congress authorized a statue to be erected in his honor, the only outdoor monument of a Confederate general in Washington, D. C. The eleven-foot bronze statue, created by the noted Italian sculptor Gaetano Trentanobe, now stands beside the Department of Labor. Needless to say, there currently are raucous cries and mass demonstrations to have this one hundred and twenty year-old memorial removed from public view.

Today's conventional wisdom, as well as most of America's history textbooks related to the War Between the States, portray those in the North as gallant crusaders against slavery, and those in the South as traitorous defenders of that institution. But what of men like New England's Albert Pike and the tens of thousands of his fellow Northerners who elected to live and die in Dixie? While recounting the tales of all such individuals would require volumes, a simple look at the men from non-Confederate states or other countries who, like Pike, served the Confederacy as general officers should suffice to prove wrong all those who now seek to destroy monuments to the Confederacy, haul down its flags and point the finger of slavery's shame at the South and her defenders. In all, there were approximately four hundred and twenty-five individuals who held the four ranks of general in the Confederate Army, with over twenty per cent of these coming from non-Confederate areas. While one might argue that the seventy generals who came from the border states of Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri should be eliminated from the equation because of their physical and philosophic proximity to the Confederacy, there remained the almost forty others from different regions. Of these, New York and Pennsylvania each supplied seven, followed by Ohio's six, five from Massachusetts, three from New Jersey, two from Maine and one each from Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa and Rhode Island.